The present invention relates to a method for identifying a telecommunications subscriber and a telecommunications device for carrying out the method.
Communication between individuals using telephony, especially mobile telephony, is becoming increasingly important. For telecommunications subscribers it is important, particularly when establishing a telephone connection, to know the identity of the caller before answering the call. The called telecommunications subscriber can use various facilities to display the identity of the caller; for example, in the form of the name and telephone number of the caller. Usually, there is a database stored on the telecommunications device of the called telecommunications subscriber in which telephone numbers and associated names are saved. For calls where the telephone number of the caller is usually transmitted, the telecommunications device of the called subscriber can determine the name of the caller from the database. The telephone number and the name of the caller are displayed.
There is, however, a problem when a caller calls another telecommunications subscriber, the recipient, for the first time. In this case, the recipient has probably not stored an entry in the database in his/her telecommunications device and so the name of the caller cannot be displayed.
To overcome this problem, a caller can store specific personal identification information on his/her communications device and then transfer this during call signaling to the communication device of a particular recipient. This type of identification information could, for example, contain name, company, e-mail address in text form and other specific information as audio data or image data.
One disadvantage of this method during call signaling, in which a caller sends all his/her available identification information or subscriber data to the recipient, is that the caller transfers a large volume of data to the recipient with every call or call signaling, irrespective of the performance of the telecommunications device of the recipient. Not only is it costly for the caller to transfer large data volumes, it is possible that the telecommunications device of the recipient is not able to process all the caller data that has been transferred. If, for example, the telecommunications device of the recipient either does not have a display facility or does not have a suitable display facility, the device cannot display any image files transferred by the caller that would make transferring any image data to such a recipient inappropriate and superfluous.
Documents WO 99/45687 and “ANONYMOUS: ‘H.245: Control Protocol for multimedia communication’ ITU-T RECOMMENDATION H.245, XX, XX, Mai 1999 (1999-05), XP002199601” discuss exchanging the properties or capabilities of terminals to establish that the signals sent from one to the other terminal can be correctly received before setting up a communications link such as voice or video link between the two terminals.
The present invention seeks to enable subscriber identification of a subscriber in a telecommunications connection with a minimum flow of data.